Mobilizing the Public Against the President: Congress and the Political Costs of Unilateral Action

Prior scholarship overlooks the capacity of other actors to raise the political costs of unilateral action by turning public opinion against the president. Through a series of five experiments embedded in nationally representative surveys, we demonstrate Congress’s ability to erode support for unilateral actions by raising both constitutional and policy-based objections to the exercise of unilateral power. Congressional challenges to the unilateral president diminish support for executive action across a range of policy areas in both the foreign and domestic realm and are particularly influential when they explicitly argue that presidents are treading on congressional prerogatives. We also find evidence that constitutional challenges are more effective when levied by members of Congress than by other actors. The results resolve a debate in the literature and suggest a mechanism through which Congress might exercise a constraint on the president, even when it is unable to check him legislatively. Replication Materials: The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LVHIYG. Existing scholarship paints a dour picture of the institutional constraints on presidential unilateral power (Howell 2003; Mayer 2001). Collective action dilemmas, supermajoritarian requirements, and steep transaction costs all but ensure that in most cases Congress will be unable to overturn an executive action (Brady and Volden 1998; Epstein and O’Halloran 1999; Moe 1994). Empirical analyses confirm that Congress rarely challenges unilateral actions legislatively, and when it does, such efforts usually fail (Howell 2003; Warber 2006).1 Similarly, the judiciary offers at best an uneven check on unilateral power. Most unilateral actions are never challenged in court, and when they are, presidents win an overwhelming majority of the cases (Howell 2003, 151–54). However, when deciding whether to act unilaterally, presidents consider more than the likelihood of Congress enacting legislation to overturn their order or of the courts ruling it unconstitutional. Presidents also consider the political costs of going it alone, and they weigh these against the expected policy benefits of doing so. Past scholarship has acknowledged the existence of these more informal political costs, even if it has given them little emphasis or empirical testing (e.g., Mayer 2009, 441; Moe and Howell 1999, 138). Moreover, prior research is largely silent on For critiques of this dominant view, see Chiou and Rothenberg (2013), Bolton and Thrower (2016), and Belco and Rottinghaus (2017). what form these political costs take and how other political actors generate and shape the magnitude of these costs. We examine one of the most important potential checks on presidential unilateral overreach—public opinion (Christenson and Kriner 2015; Posner and Vermeule 2010). Until recently, scholars have paid scant attention to how the public assesses unilateral action. Moreover, the two most recent and comprehensive analyses of these opinion dynamics have reached diametrically opposite conclusions. An analysis of broad attitudes toward unilateral power finds supermajorities opposed to general assertions of unilateral power (Reeves and Rogowski 2016). By contrast, an analysis of public assessments of presidential unilateralism taken by Presidents Bush and Obama finds little evidence of intrinsic opposition to unilateral action; rather, public opinion breaks reliably along partisan and policy lines (Christenson and Kriner forthcoming). The former suggests a strong, automatic public constraint on presidential unilateralism, whereas the latter suggests a weaker and more conditional popular check. We seek to bridge this divide by examining the capacity of other political actors—primarily members of Congress—to activate citizens’ underlying qualms American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 00, No. 0, xxxx 2017, Pp. 1–17 C ©2017, Midwest Political Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12298